The Hoppe Research Professor Awards are made to SIUE faculty members in order to recognize and support individual programs of research or creative activities. These awards recognize faculty members whose research or creative activities have the promise of making significant contributions to their fields of study. The Hoppe Research Professorship supports a significant and discrete portion of a faculty member’s larger research agenda for a two-year period.

Winner: Dr. Krzysztof Jarosz, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences

Projects: “Small Deformations of Operator Algebras”

Dr. Jarosz’s project focuses on noncommutative Banach algebras, or operator algebras, and will explore various aspects of small deformations/ and perturbations of these noncommutative algebras. Noncommutative algebras depend largely on the order of an operation for a result, and thus, a slight change in order of the operations may affect the result. Banach algebra is a frequently employed model in scientific applications that serves as an analogue for an infinite dimensional Euclidean space together with specifically defined operations on that space. Those operations, in turn, serve as analogues for different operations on spatial vectors. Banach algebras are useful in such fields as quantum physics and relativity. Dr. Jarosz will be exploring how various deformations affect the noncommutative Banach algebras. Because the research area relies on the development of new tools and methods, Dr. Jarosz will be conducting collaborative work with other esteemed mathematicians throughout the globe.